| I'm going to disagree with the consensus here and say that the price per employee is probably lower when its a bootstrapped company vs a vc funded company, all other things being equal for two reasons: 1) With a VC you have someone in your corner with considerable connections and pull( The VC), to advocate for you. As someone who has been on the acquiring side of the table I think alot of people would be very surprised to see just how many aquihires are either "favors" to the VC or deals that came about because the VC is able to get ahold of the correct person at the acquiring company to make the deal happen. No VC, no favor. 2) VC funding is a signalling mechanism. Someone, who is presumably a good judge of ideas and talent, has blessed you as worthy and therefore you've passed this bar. The bootstrap company, has not had the blessing and therefor is unproven. Think about it, who would you hire, someone you've never met before or someone who has been vouched for by someone you respect and trust. Again this is all other things being equal. So if I'm the acquirer, my question to you is, why am I paying you a per employee premium when I can wait two months for you to shut down and then offer each employee on your team a job at a market salary. That seems to save me a lot of money. Heck why not give each person at your company a blanket offer of employment right now. If you want to get paid, you need to give the acquirer a reason to pay a premium to aquihrie you. Like others have said, the first, second and third rule of negotiating is to always have a BATNA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat... |
An acquihire is generally a buyout of the team, not the technology, the product, or its business prospects. As the team, I would think about how uniquely skilled you are in the domain for which you're presumably being acquihired. Think about your own BATNA, but also think about the acquirer's BATNA. How many yous are out there? How crucial is your team to the acquirer's business objectives? Do you have a sense for specifically why they want you? Is it to build out a new business practice or vertical strategy? A new product? Are you better qualified to do that than the market at large? How much better? How long would it take a deep-pocketed company to assemble a comparable team?
Many (most?) acquihires are indeed VC-mediated. The rest are usually because a team has managed to distinguish itself as a uniquely valuable and concentrated source of talent or domain expertise, such that finding an alternative on the open market, or building one internally, would take a lot of time, money, and false starts. In that case the acquirer's corp dev team probably has a specific calculus it uses to value acquired teams versus building new ones, multiplied in some way by the business upside of the domain or skill in question. If your team operates in a domain with major or mission-critical upside to the acquirer, expect a more generous offer. If your team operates in a nice-to-have, but supporting or uncritical domain for the acquirer, you have less leverage.